Any film that combines Thomas Hardy, graphic novelist Posy Simmonds and British director Stephen Frears has to be a brew of unusual interest, and Tamara Drewe is just that. It’s a pastoral comedy with iron in its soul — Chehkov Lite if you like.
Simmonds drew her inspiration from Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd and the film is set deep in the Dorset countryside where Tamara (Gemma Arterton) arrives in her home village after a spell away, transformed by a nose job from ugly duckling to femme fatale.
Sultry: Gemma Arterton as Tamara Drewe disappoints the local literary set by rejecting their advances in favour of a drummer
She’s come to do up and sell her dead mother’s house but finds herself avoiding the clutches of the literary set who inhabit the village and would quite like a nice little sexual change from their wives to perk up their flagging muses. She does not avoid, however, the amorous advances of Dominic Cooper’s rock drummer. Which makes the middle-aged literary gents mad as hell.
Arterton, who played Tess in the BBC adaptation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, doesn’t have to stretch her dramatic abilities as far as that here. But she manages to convince us that half the village, and the drummer, would lust after her while remaining an intelligent young woman on the make, rather more than sexually. And Cooper is excellent as the dotty drummer who is just passing by with the band.
Frears orchestrates all this with some skill, much helped by Moira Buffini’s sharp screenplay, which remains as faithful to Posy as it can.
Perhaps it doesn’t amount to a great deal but there is some pretty good fun, with a few darker notes to make you think too. Will foreigners appreciate this very English stew? That’s an open question. But the Cannes audience certainly seemed to.
Tamara Drewe
